Survey is now closed, analyses have been run, paper is complete! A big THANK YOU to everyone who took the time to participate!
Out of 66 total responses (awesome!) I was able to generate some great data! Here's a little look inside what I found. I tried to remove the technical statistical and anthropological jargon to make it a little easier to swallow.
The five sets of questions aimed to measure five broad motivations: second-hand shopping as a form of entertainment or fun, uniqueness of items available, bargain hunting, history of times available, and reuse/anti-consumerism. A person could "strongly agree," which was coded as a 5, "agree" which was coded as a 4, all the way down to "strongly disagree," which was coded as a 1.
Of the motivations measured, the statements regarding bargain hunting had the highest mean values (which averaged out to 4.406 where 5 is the highest level), which makes hunting for bargains the most motivating factor! The motivation of reusing old items rather than buying something new came in right behind it with a mean of 4.318. Third place went to fun/entertainment with a mean of 4.27. Then uniqueness of items offered at second-hand stores had a mean of 4.03, followed by historical value of items with a mean of 3.85. But overall all the factors were found to be highly motivational.
I also compared the motivation-based question sets’ answer totals to one another to identify how correlated motivations are among respondents. Most of the motivations were found to be correlated with one another, indicating that when a person is motivated by one of the factors, another of the factors also motivates them. Rather than discussing the many positively correlated motivational factors, I will instead discuss the factors that were found to be relatively independent of each other. In other words, they did not often occur in the same person.
The motivation of entertainment/fun-seeking and social motivation of anti-consumerism/reuse were not found to be significantly correlated. One hypothesis for this low correlation might be that those who shop second-hand for social reasons do not do so for the fun involved in the process. Instead they shop second-hand for the necessities and do not enjoy the actual act of consuming. For these socially-minded consumers, the act of second-hand shopping is simply the most practical way of achieving their goal of reuse, recycling, or maintaining a low impact on the environment.
The motivations of bargain hunting and historical interest were found to be correlated, but to a very small degree. Only at the .05 level of significance were they found to be correlated at all. I hypothesize that the reason behind this may be that bargain hunters often are looking for new, modern items that are currently in fashion and for sale in retail stores. They are interested in finding items relevant to current trends at a low price. I also think that those who look for historical pieces are less price-conscious because they are sometimes collectors, who will spend whatever necessary in order to add an item to their collection, or because they know that items from decades in the past have a higher price-point than more recent second-hand items because of their rarity.
Next I sought to determine whether or not motivations varied among two demographic categories: gender and, separately, political affiliation. I first compared the means of each question set total with the respondents’ genders to see if different genders were motivated by different things. I was surprised to find that none of the motivational factors were different among men and women. The largest difference in the means of responses from females and responses from males was related to the first motivational factor of shopping second-hand for fun or entertainment. However, this difference among female and male respondents was not found to be statistically significant.
Next I looked at how motivational factors might vary among political affiliations. I classified political affiliations into four groups: liberal, conservative, moderate, or indifferent/apathetic. I compared the means of responses on each motivation-based question set from the different political groups and again found no statistically significant differences. In other words, people of different political affiliations have very similar motivations to second-hand shop.
Again, thank you all so much for your input and participation!
